Processors may use caches in order to have more rapid access to data than would be possible if all data needed to be accessed directly from system memory. It is possible to read from cache much faster than reading from system memory. It is also possible to write to cache, and put off updating the corresponding data in system memory until a time convenient for the processor or its cache. When using processor caches in multiprocessor environments, care must be taken to ensure that the various copies of the data are the same, or at least that any changes be tracked and accounted for. Strict equality of the data is not necessary or even desired: as mentioned above, sometimes the cache will contain modified data and will update the system memory later. Similarly, several processors may share data. If one processor writes an updated copy of the data into its cache, it should either tell the other processors that it did so in order that they may not trust their data in the future, or it should send a copy of the updated data around to the other processors. Various sets of rules that ensure the coherency, if not the equality, of data in multiple processors' caches are called cache coherency schemes.
One family of cache coherency schemes are those using a write-back cache. In a write-back cache, data in the cache may be modified, often by writing to the cache and setting the status to modified or “M” status, or to an owned or “O” status. The O state may be considered a modified-shared state, which allows shared data that is modified to remain in the cache. The cache that contains an O cache line takes on the responsibility to update the memory at a later time. Cache lines with either a modified or “M” status, or to an owned or “O” status, may be called dirty cache lines. However, the copy of the data in memory may remain in the non-dirty state, avoiding the immediate need to write the dirty data to memory. This may yield performance improvements over writing the dirty data to memory immediately subsequent to the modification of the data within the cache. Generally, the dirty data will be written into memory subsequent to a triggering event. These triggering events may include evicting the dirty cache line because another cache line wishes to replace it in the corresponding block within the cache, or because another processor wishes to modify the same cache line.